Dammit, get this thread back to the front page :S About 5-6 days total work on this, and this is what I have so far. Arrows indicate that something will go there...eventually. Total progress about 55%~ ish. You can tell by this screen that layouts are NOT my forte. I'm going to link the first and second areas together through some warped caves with flesh err'where to produce some more fluiditiy, give 3 keys somewhere, and end with some cybie(s) battle.

One of the biggest bonuses in layout, at least in my opinion, is having the map contain a lot of inter-connectivity (or loop back around), so the player has a chance to pick up any missed goodies near the beginning/middle. Other than that, it depends what you're going for. Multiple battle arenas are fine being linked together with hallways, and as long as you're not making your map extremely linear (with 0 exploration), it should be fine.

Trying to get The Sigil ready for the beta, but I'm suffering with the final battle. I don't want to make the IoS fight a pushover since constantly spawning enemies makes for a pretty cool finale, but in order to encourage the player to fight the hordes of demons, I feel like I'm putting too many cyberdemons in. To counteract that I'm throwing down tons of cell and health, but I feel like it'll be criticized for being a BFG spam fest at the end, even though I think the battle is interesting and frantic enough that it doesn't feel dull or boring... but I dunno. It offers up a lot of resistance if players want to speed to the end, which I assume a lot of people are going to do, but I have no other way to stop that other than throwing the big baddie in.

@Obsidian, doesn'tthe Romero message play once and only once? It'd be creepier if some reverb/grunge effects were layered on, like an omniscient voice chasing you...

Nope, I'm pretty sure more spawners=more Romero messages. You could have them set to Deaf and place them around the map pretty much anywhere due to them not having sprites. Sort of like the vanilla equivalent of ambient sounds.

Wasn't able to put any work this weekend. Terribly sorry about that, but I just had no spare time. From now on i'm gonna have not promising anything because I tend to fail to deliver on time. I'll just try to get what I can done from now on and release what I can when its ready.

fiend-o-hell said:Wasn't able to put any work this weekend. Terribly sorry about that, but I just had no spare time. From now on i'm gonna have not promising anything because I tend to fail to deliver on time. I'll just try to get what I can done from now on and release what I can when its ready.

While I could definitely finish at least one more (fear of the past), I consider myself burnt out on Doom mapping for a while. I am not at a skill level approaching the other project members and some of the feedback has been frustrating after all this work, so I'd like to forego hours of fiddling with maps for no tangible result.

MajorRawne said:
some of the feedback has been frustrating after all this work, so I'd like to forego hours of fiddling with maps for no tangible result.

That's understandable major, thanks for your contributions already. Shame you don't feel like continuing with your other maps, but having a constant deadline over your head paired with feedback you may not expect does take a lot out of a person. I'll play through your maps though and provide my opinion pretty soon. Hopefully you can rest easy and work on any other maps you have at your own pace.

WELCOME TO HELL: Really like the scenery and enemy improvements you made. Taking out the cacos at the start makes fighting the hordes much more fun, especially since you're pressured to shoot down the hitscanners first. And the chaingunner perches in the monster grottos do their job quite well. Only complaint is that its rough to get health in the beginning, before thinning the hordes and dealing with the chaingunners. Might be nice to place a couple stimpacks in the grottos. Enemy mixture is spot on though.

Next ambush is nice too, although easily subdued once you work your way to the back of the horde. Nothing that needs changing. Cacos + PE and the zombie ambush are alright after. Revenants are still deadly. Clausterphobic tunnels are fun, especially since you're tempted to use rockets in such close range, and its a bit more windy. Water platforming section handles much better, got through it on my first shot with no blind jumps. The uspide-down area is still superb. Only lacking place is at the end: you can still zip past the baron and exit. If that chokepoint was tighter, it'd make it harder to skip the finale. Plus you could make the red area %10 damaging, forcing the player to stay in the middle as pinkies and Lost Souls surround him.

Only noticed a few texturing gripes: the green pillars need the correct floor texture, since they have the same one as the ground as it stands. And I noticed one switch that had the wrong texture for its ceiling. I also noticed that the chainsaw area and chainsaw pedestal are tagged as secret, when only one of them needs to be (as it's 1 secret, not 2).

Another thing you could do if you want is tag certain lines as "hidden" on the map. This makes it so you can't see the outer edges of the level on the automap, giving it a less "boxy" shape when looking at it.

TEMPLE OF FORGOTTEN GODS: Again, nice addition of details and enemy readjustment. This one still doesn't run as smooth as "Welcome to Hell", as there are a few bumps and hiccups along the way.

The start is still nice and frantic, all the way up until the second PE. You added Lost Souls to that area, and it got me thinking: take the PE out (the one in the berserk room). He pushes the player into the hallway, which by extension makes the lost souls boring and nonthreatening, as he waits for the PE to show his ugly face just to give it a makeover full of bullets. If you take the PE out, the player should spend more time outside, wedged between the lost souls and the imps.

The dark walkway with all the imps is okay, although the player can still easily snipe the imps from afar, then run to the tele. Dunno how I feel about the specters in the razor-thin walkway room. One one hand they're exceptionally dangerous since you don't know where they are, but on the other it's really obnoxious to be fight specters in the dark, especially since the damaging floor limits movement. It's against my preference, but it's your call on whether to change them to pinkies (or pinkies + an HK) if you want, either would work fine.

In the next room, with the SSG, you need to unpeg the demonic face in order to make it look normal instead of segmented. RL room is nice, but with the two floors that lower (one for the secret, other to the manc room) you need to peg (or unpeg?) those walls so it doesn't lower down with the "door". Also nice way of doing the secret.

In the PG room, I like how the gun tucked into the back so the mancs have time to flank you. AV room is great, the duo viles pose a nice threat especially if you run past the manc, and the arachnatron is a cute surprise. Cyber arena needs some fixing up though. For one, I'd change the two rocket boxes nearest to the player that warps in to a single cell pack, that way you entice the player to go into the water sooner. Also I suggest doing that so the player has a little more firepower to face the cyber, especially since the PG and BFG are the only weapons that make that fight "fun" instead of a slog.

Next problem is the cyber himself. He's tucked away in his corner so far that you can lower the lift, get on it, awaken him, and run into the tele with no damage. Instead what you should do is draw a "floor lower" trigger pretty far back so that when the player runs over it, the walls to the cyber lower and he scares you off from trying to get on the lift. Plus it should be "floor lower" to reveal him, because as it stands he can easily be led around that cubby he hides in, and then it can serve as cover for the player when he gets on the lift. The switch at the top of the lift that reveals the secret has walls that lower, so you need to peg/unpeg those. Also, raise the tele up and place a torch next to it, so the player knows where to go after hitting the switch (it can be very easy to not know what it did and run around aimlessly)

The maze walkway is MUCH better, instead of just being an A -> B path. The player spends a lot more time dodging projectiles, but there's like 2-3 mancs that get revealed when you run by their cages (which is a little too late for them to be effective). Pull the trigger back much further, about at the place when you take the first turn. RL isn't needed on the following platform, as the player picked it up earlier.

Next area is nice, as you have to be more mindful of your surroundings. A manc follows through the tele however and gets stuck at the top of the wall on the right side, which you need to fix. The pathway to the tele is also down, which it shouldn't be (I think) as you should run to hit the switch on the other side to lower it down.

HKs at the end warp in much quicker, which makes it harder to run to the exit, but since you only have to watch one side, it's not that bad (although the baron does flank). Maybe what you should do is have some barons warp in through a pedestal behind the player, so he has to watch the monsters in front of him and behind him.

Other than those things, everything else felt fine. Didn't try to 100%, so I dunno how that plays.

Mate, THANK YOU. What excellent feedback! You should do this sort of thing professionally, you find specific things that the map authors don't notice and deliver it in a motivational way, rather than simply saying it's crap in vague or demoralising terms.

Maybe you should speak to Google about ways to improve the public perception of Android, which people (possibly mongs) find hard to use compared to iOS. (Mind you, with Jelly Bean on its way, they've probably worked it out for themselves)

Your experience of fighting the Cyber seems different to mine - however I did stay to fight him, I wasn't trying to find ways to get past him since I needed to know how the fight plays out. More plasma instead of rockets would improve this fight as a super shotty and RL over damaging floors is pretty obnoxious and there is way too much room to manoeuvre.

After the silver path, I'll try to arrange it so the player MUST fight the Manc and it won't teleport through after you. In building the map I split attention between maxkill and speedrunning. That's why the player can skip stuff and isn't penalised for doing so.

Welcome; just doing my job. Since I'm not a fan of doing FDA's, I try and give as much detailed feedback as I can.

MajorRawne said:After the silver path, I'll try to arrange it so the player MUST fight the Manc and it won't teleport through after you.

I kind of like the idea of the manc teleporting in after you when you're doing the other section... he provides nice hassling from the back. Plus in order to make the player fight him before the tele, you'd have to change the geometry, since it's easy to go around him. So I'd say let the player run through and have the manc come in behind him.

Also, one of the things you should always try doing is breaking the fights in your level and seeing how that plays out (either by speedrunning or camping around a corner). It gives you the bare minimum your level plays at difficulty wise, and gives you a good idea whether or not certain enemy combinations are worth it. That's why I tiptoed around the cyber fight, was to see if I could skip it (which I could). It's also why I try and run passed certain enemies when I play, to see if they wind up flanking me or are better off skipped (which again, is why the mancs before the archviles work out so well). Also, one thing I thought up that you could do is put "block monster" lines around the tele in the dual archvile room, that way the arach is locked in place and the player has to kill them in order to move on (as it stands, the arach just walks out and the player can freely run away.)

Spider Island Part 1 (or whatever the third actual map is) has a completely screwed blockmap where the east most side of the map lets you completely exit the playable area and just start walking through walls. Also you can run past the entire map and exit without firing a single shot.

"Welcome to Fear" (panophobia) has been tweaked as suggested by dobugabumaru. I was going to include more visual tweaks. Unfortunately, the map consists of loads of linedefs that are "broken up" to create irregular terrain so the map is inherently resistant to change. It's impossible to tweak one region without having to re-do lots of detailing. I am therefore calling this map 100% completed.

"Temple of Forgotten Gods" (aquaphobia) has been partially tweaked in line with dobugabumaru's suggestions, and just needs the Cyberdemon arena sorting out so the player has to fight the Cyber rather than just dodging its attacks.

I have scrapped "The House that Fear Built" as unworkable for this project. I can't introduce new themes to this map, as it's a simple battle through an old-school tech base, it wasn't designed to be anything more and the map's cramped quarters limit my ability to modify what's already there.

I've started a new map called "Acid Reign" which was built from scratch to evoke a "fear of the past" by presenting players with rooms and situations that will be familiar to anyone who played the following maps (stars indicate the tribute area has been finished):

This map does not play like a mish-mash of ripped ideas. It will need extensive playtesting, and there is more work to be done, but it should be good for a quirky nostalgia trip. (And it is VERY quirky.)

I'd replace Nirvana with The Spirit World, partly because it's my favourite Doom 2 map, but mostly due to Nirvana's somewhat bad rep. The Spirit World is a bit more well known and also considered one of the only "proper" Hell maps in Doom 2.

I'll check it out mate, thanks for the tip. This is planned to be an earlier map in the wad so I couldn't have two Spiderdemons duking it out in an acid pit... although that would actually be really cool. Hmm...

The "Nirvana" inspiration comes from a large acid room with monsters on ledges, which I always thought was really interesting. A skilled player can rampage through any Doom map, it's rare for there to be an area where the monsters have a big advantage over the player like this. Not sure if this area will make it into the final map yet. I always liked Nirvana, wonder why no-one else does?

EDIT: Sorry for the screenshots, I've only got basic software on my computer.

I'm sticking with Doom 2 textures so have had to improvise slightly, which I'm hoping will make my map distinct rather than viewed as a rip-off. The map is supposed to remind players, they're not being forced to re-live maps they've played a million times ;)